"We have to state one more time that the ruling of conviction delivered by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia [ICTY] to Mr. Mladic, the former chief commander of Republica Srpska's armed forces, is the continuation of a politicized and biased policy that has prevailed in the activities of the ICTY from the very beginning," Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova has stated.
According to Zakharova, the tribunal used a biased and anti-Serb interpretation of the events that took place in the region, undermining the process of restoring mutual trust between the Balkan nations.
#Zakharova: We have to state that the ICTY's guilty verdict against former Bosnian Serb military leader Ratko Mladic continues the politicised and biased course that has prevailed in the tribunal's process pic.twitter.com/G0gYjZ2KkA
— MFA Russia 🇷🇺 (@mfa_russia) November 23, 2017
Previously, Russia vetoed a UN resolution describing the Srebrenica massacre as a "crime of genocide" since Moscow argued that the war in Yugoslavia saw the crime of ethnic cleansing committed by all warring sides and not by the Bosnian Serbs alone.
In December 2016, prosecutors demanded a life sentence for Mladic for his role in the alleged killing of 8,000 Muslim men and boys during the July 1995 Srebrenica massacre, for the protracted siege and bombardment of the Bosnian capital of Sarajevo and the "ethnic cleansing" of Muslims and Croats in other areas.
